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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

byEliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares

The Case Against Superintelligent AI

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AI is the greatest threat to our existence that we have ever faced.

The technology may be complex but the facts are simple. We are currently on a path to build superintelligent AI. When we do, it will be vastly more powerful than us. Whether it ‘thinks’ or ‘feels’ is irrelevant, but it will have objectives and they will be completely different from ours. And regardless of how we train it, even the slightest deviation from human goals will be catastrophic for our species – meaning extinction. Precisely how this happens is unknowable, but we what do know is that when it happens, it will happen incredibly fast, and however it happens all paths lead to the same conclusion: superintelligent AI is a global suicide bomb, the labs who are developing it have no adequate plan or set of policies for tackling this issue, and we will not get a second chance.

From the leading thinkers in the field of AI risk, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies explains with terrifying clarity why in the race to build superintelligent AI, the only winning move for our species is not to play.

The most important book I’ve read for years: I want to bring it to every political and corporate leader in the world and stand over them until they’ve read it. Yudkowsky and Soares, who have studied AI and its possible trajectories for decades, sound a loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster. Their brilliant gift for analogy, metaphor and parable clarifies for the general reader the tangled complexities of AI engineering, cognition and neuroscience better than any book on the subject I’ve ever read, and I’ve waded through scores of them. We really must rub our eyes and wake the fuck up!

Stephen Fry

About Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and the founder of the field of AI alignment research. He is one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the topic of AI risk, and his TIME magazine op-ed of 2023 is largely responsible for sparking the current concern and discussion around the potential for human extinction.
Details
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • ISBN: 9781847928924
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Price: £22.00
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